Officers from the Radcliffe neighbourhood policing team, intelligence officers, members of Bury’s drugs team and the Serious Organised Crime Agency raided a three-storey derelict building on Milltown Street, next to Bridge Methodist Church, on the morning of 24 November 2009 after a helicopter thermal-imaging flight showed the building up as red from heated grow lights.[1][2] They forced a reinforced door at about 8.30am and found cannabis plants in different stages of growth on all floors, with neighbours’ surveillance footage from the church handed to police.[1] Sergeant Martin Coyne called it the largest cannabis farm in Bury for many years.[1] Jian Wang, 26, was charged with being concerned in the cultivation of cannabis and abstraction of electricity and was due before Bury Magistrates Court that afternoon.[1]
At Bolton Crown Court on Friday 26 March 2010, Wang pleaded guilty to being concerned in the production of cannabis and was jailed for 30 months, with deportation to China on release.[2] The court heard officers found him alone in the derelict Paragon House mill on Milltown Street, asleep in a small second-floor room beside a bag with Mandarin and English instructions for growing cannabis efficiently.[2] Prosecutor Lisa Bakker said 1,200 plants were recovered across two ground-floor and two first-floor rooms under high-powered lighting, amounting to 48kg of cannabis worth £205,000 if sold in separate units.[2] Judge Elliot Knopf called it a sophisticated cultivation arrangement and said people recruited to garden such farms, often having arrived illegally, would face custody and deportation where appropriate.[2]
